I walked into my house the other day, and my wife asked me 'I wonder if this is what 1968 felt like.' With all the Vietnam references to Iraq recently, I started to wonder if the similarities were true. Then it hit me. We may be reliving Vietnam, but we are still fighting the civil war.
As somebody at I BOPNews noted a couple of weeks ago (
Blue vs. Grey), for the most part, the union is represented by blue states, the confederacy by red ones. Now, what I'm about to say is a completely emotional argument, and I've got no factual information to back my sorry ass up.
Are we not still two Americas? It seems that the liberal and conservative labels are simply replacements for those of 140 years ago. We were a dichotomy at our creation - a country that wrote of the independence and importance of each person, but supported slavery. In our founding, we started what has been a national bipolar disorder that exists, I think untouched, to this day. There are those of us that support the words in those first documents, and will fight tooth and nail to make them real. And there is the other side, who chose to ignore those words and essentially support an 'us versus them' mentality. I think its the same mind that said a slave is 2/3 of a person that says the Iraqi people needed to be liberated because they were somehow to infantile to overturn a dictator on their own. And the excuses match up too. You can't abolish slavery - it will kill the southern economy. Saddam was going to attack. Someday, Somehow. Really. We don't need to explain. Bush in many ways is G rated bigotry and racism; the fundamental belief that white men are somehow better than everybody else, and he and his ilk make me sick.
Can we ever get past this? I really don't know, and I open it up to the floor for discussion. Am I way off base here?